Sales are an integral part of operating practically any business, and as such, great importance may be laid upon the sales processes used to identify the sales opportunities, monitor and manage the opportunities, and convert the opportunities into actual sales. Small-scale sales opportunities may be identified, monitored, managed, and converted by one or two people and the entire lifespan of the opportunity may last on a short period of time. However, larger-scale sales opportunities may require large teams of sales people working across multiple sales phases, each of which may span months or even years. It is likely that during the course of such large-scale sales opportunities, the procuring business will lose multiple sales persons involved in the procurement process, well before the opportunity may be won. As such, unless the procuring business has a defined sales strategy in place, often times when employees leave a business, so too leaves their knowledge of the business's sales processes.
Businesses seek ways to formalize their sales processes and decouple the sales knowledge from their employees and transfer it into systems that may be implemented and that remain viable even in the face of employee turnover. Additionally, businesses seek ways to quickly and efficiently determine which sales strategy to use for their current sales situation, without having to spend time answering irrelevant questions.
There may exist best practice sales approaches, especially in the case of large-scale sales opportunities, however with a people-centric system it may be difficult to determine where in the sales lifecycle the company currently operates and what is the best practice or action needed to take to help win the procurement.